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70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation
When the dance begins, they are all onstage together. But they are each very much alone. In the opening vignette of Anna Sokolow’s “Rooms,” there are eight chairs scattered across the stage and eight performers who inhabit them — like city apartments squished so close together yet keeping their occupants apart.
No one makes eye contact. They stare straight ahead. They stand and sit back down. They flop to the side and fold themselves over their thighs. They stretch out horizontally, one leg extending on a diagonal before falling to the floor with a thud. One dancer sets her chin in her palms, her gaze fixed on a corner, as though willing herself to see through a brick wall.
These are people trapped in their own tiny worlds, radiating loneliness, isolation, restlessness, fear, fantasy, desire, distress, panic.
Watching them at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City last month — the day after the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, 13 months into a second Trump administration that has targeted immigrants and transgender people, among others, and in the midst of what former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2023 report deemed “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation” — one could easily imagine “Rooms” was created in 2026. Or during the global pandemic and lockdowns of recent history.
But Sokolow was long gone by the time COVID forced us into our own rooms, physically and socially distant from almost everyone else. She didn’t live to see the tiny screens and tempting apps that would degrade our attention spans and become intermediaries in so many of our conversations. She missed the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots that offer alternatives to human interaction.
Sokolow, who died in 2000 at the age of 90, created “Rooms” seven decades ago, in the wake of a world war and the Holocaust, at a time when polio was rampant, and in the midst of a nuclear arms race and the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1950s.
Yet “Rooms” still feels believable, relatable and unsettling today.
‘An incredible humanity’
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, Sokolow grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City — at the time, the densely packed “capital of Jewish America.” Sokolow’s mother, Sarah, a factory worker, was active in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and was, as Sokolow later described her, “a staunch Socialist.”
Sarah was “angered by the conditions she observed all around her,” writes Sokolow’s biographer, Larry Warren, and kept up with “socialist causes and political activities” by reading Yiddish-language newspapers such as the Forward.
Like her mother, Sokolow looked closely at what was happening around her. She took it all in and put it onstage, Samantha Géracht, artistic director of the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble, told me.
“She walked everywhere,” said Géracht, who was part of the rotation of dancers who accompanied Sokolow to rehearsals when she kept walking everywhere, slowly, into her 80s. “Every shopkeeper, every unhoused person in a doorway, everybody spoke to her, and she spoke to everyone,” Géracht said. “She looked and saw everyone and everything, and she didn’t dismiss any of them.”
Though secular, Sokolow was driven by Jewish values, Hannah Kosstrin, a dance historian at Ohio State University and director of its Melton Center for Jewish Studies, told me over Zoom. “She was most interested in making dances about the underdog,” said Kosstrin, who is also the author of Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow. “About people who were not served by society, people who were unwanted, untouchable, and people who had been through the worst of humanitarian experiences.”
In the 1930s, she made, among other dances, the anti-fascist “Anti-War Trilogy”; “Slaughter of the Innocents,” inspired by the Spanish Civil War; and “The Exile” — which portrayed Jewish life in Europe and the arrival of Nazism. She danced “Kaddish” in 1945 as an “elegy” mourning the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, according to Kosstrin, and later choreographed “Dreams,” which Géracht describes as Sokolow’s “Holocaust nightmares onstage.”
Her work “has an incredible humanity to it,” Kosstrin said.
Kosstrin first encountered Sokolow through a film of “Rooms” as a freshman dance major. “I just remember being absolutely taken with it. It was so intense and so gritty and so real,” she said. “I felt a very particular kind of distress in a way that I had never felt watching dance before,” she added. “That was so incredibly powerful.”
“Rooms,” which had its New York premiere in 1955, was inspired by the Lower East Side tenement houses of Sokolow’s youth. It’s spare — performed with no backdrop, only lighting, chairs, and simple costumes to an original jazz score by the American composer Kenyon Hopkins. Part of its enduring potency is that it could represent any time and any place.
‘I believe you’
Introducing the performance at the museum, Géracht set the scene with one simple instruction. Picture, she told the audience, a building with its facade removed so you could peer into all the apartments and look — really look, as Sokolow would — at the people inside.
In one vignette titled “Going,” a man careens about like he’s just flipped the release valve on his pent-up energy, exploding in big jumps, sliding onto the floor, and snapping his fingers. In “Desire,” six dancers slide their feet back and forth as though caressing the ground. They reach an arm or a leg, as if yearning to entangle their limbs with a lover’s.
In “Escape,” I saw a woman dance with someone who isn’t there. She stands, arms thrown up high, spinning around herself. She flits around the stage. She pulls two chairs to face each other, sits down, and catches the air in an empty embrace. Later, she swipes at each of the chairs in turn and they clatter to the ground.
“She’s very different from me,” dancer Ilana Ruth Cohen told me of the character she embodies in “Escape.” “I do not escape easily, and I don’t tend to look for an escape.” What’s helped, she said, is “remembering the moments I do have where I am drifting or dreaming or imagining being somewhere else, and then trying to use Anna’s movement to expand my experience of those moments.”
There are no prescribed narratives in “Rooms,” just snippets of images and an urgency of emotion that might be read differently by every spectator. That’s OK, Cohen said. “I’m not trying to make sure that the audience knows what my experience is,” she explained. “I’m using my experience to make the movement true, and then the audience has an experience because they’re with me as that’s happening.”
Kosstrin focused her research around the idea of “honest bodies” in part as a way “to highlight Sokolow’s emphasis on believable, raw vulnerability in performance.” As such, Lauren Naslund, an associate artistic director of the ensemble, told me at a recent rehearsal, high praise from Sokolow would be: “You’re doing it in your own way, and I believe you.”
In the vignette “The End?” I saw a woman having a breakdown. Her left hand makes talking motions — thumb to fingers, open and shut — arguing with her right. Her fingers rise toward her ears and wiggle frantically as she extends her arms outward. She steps onto her chair, head tilted back, and flaps her arms like wings in slow motion. Her fragile psyche manifests in movement. She is, perhaps, hearing voices in her head. Feeling her thoughts slip out of her control. Wondering whether she wants to remain in this world.
“Rooms” concludes as it starts, with eight chairs and eight dancers — so close to each other, but still very much alone.
There’s a clip Géracht shows in her lectures with a voiceover from Sokolow speaking on top of footage from “Rooms.” “I don’t end it, because I don’t feel there’s any ending,” Sokolow says. “That’s the Jew in me. Ask the world a question and there’s no answer. All I do is present what I feel and you, you answer.”
‘A kind of beacon’
The Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble was about four weeks away from presenting “Rooms” when the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone home in March 2020 and cleared live performance calendars indefinitely. Suddenly, Géracht said, “we didn’t have to struggle with the idea of how to understand isolation.”
Relegated to their homes like everyone else, the dancers continued working on “Rooms” over Zoom. “You can’t go outside. There’s no classes. There’s no rehearsals. There’s nothing,” remembered dancer Margherita Tisato, who performs the challenging solo “The End?”. “Having a task and having time to dedicate to do this was definitely lifesaving on an emotional level, probably for a lot of us.”
At the same time, she said, “it was asking me to dig more and more deeply into the thing that was, at the moment, really, really hard.” The project provided a creative outlet, but also forced her to grapple with her own feelings of aloneness and isolation.
Eventually, the dancers worked with their rehearsal directors to select the right angles, propped up their computers and phones, and hit record to capture themselves navigating bookcases, coffee tables, cats, and narrow hallways. Naslund edited the footage together to create “Rooms2020,” a COVID-era interpretation of the piece they couldn’t share in person. They later partnered with Madison-based Kanopy Dance to livestream a joint production from Wisconsin and New York, offered virtual workshops to college dance students, and put on a “Rooms” symposium.
“There could not have been a better dance to stage during the pandemic than ‘Rooms’ on video in people’s apartments,” Kosstrin said. Looking back, she said, it offers a social, emotional, and aesthetic window into that moment, with so many stuck in their own bubbles and thrust into each others’ living rooms through tiny squares on their screens.
Géracht said she immersed herself so deeply in “Rooms” that she needed a break before revisiting it again. Although the lockdown experiences are still embedded in the dancers’ bodies and memories, they couldn’t let the work get stuck or stale.
“You don’t want to replicate what you did six years ago,” said Géracht.
“It’s like going on a hike up a really high mountain. Maybe you’ve climbed that mountain,” she said. “You kind of know the way, but you still have to do the whole hike from the bottom to the top.” Every time you do it, “you’re different, the movement’s different, the world is different. And I don’t want the last version you did. I want you now. Which is why we can do the work for so long.”
Géracht is intent on breathing new life into Sokolow’s dances in 2026 and beyond. She wants audiences to experience the “wealth and range” of Sokolow’s work and “understand her genius,” Géracht said, as an artist who “shows us our entire spectrum of human emotion.”
In “Rooms,” Sokolow reminds us, in 2026 as in 2020 as in 1955, what it’s like to crave connection or touch. To conjure a loved one in our mind, only to be startled by the reality of their absence. To get lost in a daydream. To fear what’s outside our control. To feel utterly alone. To be consumed by panic. To fall apart.
Complete, live productions of “Rooms” are somewhat rare. But the ensemble has just confirmed it will perform the piece again at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September. Having seen — and felt — it for myself recently, I hope there will be many more shows to come.
Distressing as it may be to see this “cry of alienation and isolation” reflected back at us right now, Kosstrin said, it could also help us find our way. “We are seeing so many things happen around us that [are] making us question our humanity and other people’s humanity,” she said. Artists like Sokolow, she believes, “can give us a kind of beacon as we try to muddle through these times.”
The post 70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation appeared first on The Forward.
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They met on a Birthright trip then married. Now this American Israeli couple’s internet fame has turned to infamy.
Ethan and Hila Klein first met at Yad Vashem — Israel’s Holocaust museum — in 2007, a meet-cute they recounted, giggling, years later for their millions of YouTube followers.
“I think I went up to her and said something like, ‘They had it coming, don’t you think?’” said Ethan, known for his edgy humor and infamous internet trends, including Vape Nation and Papa Bless. “No I didn’t say that. I wonder if you would have laughed though.”
They were on a Birthright trip, Ethan an American and Hila an Israeli soldier on leave to join the group. Soon after the trip ended, Ethan moved to Israel to be with Hila, and the two began making videos under the name H3H3 Productions (the H for Hila and the 3 standing in as an E for Ethan). They married, moved to America, and started a popular podcast.
A Jewish love story, until Thursday, when Hila, now mother to their three children, accused Ethan publicly of having a months-long affair.
“The betrayal I feel is immeasurable,” Hila said in an Instagram post. “My only family on this side of the world. How do I even begin to make sense of this?”
Ethan reposted her statement.
Their podcast is run by a handful of crew members who often chime in and participate in various skits and bits. The crew also shared a statement saying they stand with Hila and refuse to work with Ethan, though they added they don’t know what this will mean for the future of the show.
A couple roiled by Oct. 7
The left-leaning, secular couple’s videos and podcasts focused primarily on pop culture, internet drama and general politics, not Jewish or Israeli issues.
Both Ethan and Hila would make statements sometimes when tensions in Israel flared, and they would occasionally speak out against IDF actions that upset them.
In 2021, Ethan started a podcast with political commenter Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing influencer, called Leftovers, a nod to their leftist politics.
Then came Oct. 7.
Ethan, an American Israeli dual citizen like Hila, was horrified by the attacks but quick to call the IDF genocidal in the aftermath. In their first episode together after Oct. 7, Ethan and Piker said the show would continue through their disagreements. The episode was tense, and it was their last.
As Piker’s rhetoric on Israel intensified and became at times antisemitic, the two began a nasty internet feud, culminating in a nearly five-hour livestreamed debate.
Piker posted about the news of the affair on X, sharing a video of Ethan and expressing disgust for men who cheat.
“Now this is a high caliber man [with] good morals,” Piker said sarcastically. He also posted “Judge me by my enemies” after sharing Hila’s statement.
Hila, who owns a makeup and clothing company, increasingly came under scrutiny by Piker and others after Oct. 7 for her service in the IDF. Artists refused to work with her. One model she hired publicly disavowed her after finding out she was Israeli.
The couple was harassed, sometimes online, sometimes in-person, as they attempted to take what they viewed as a nuanced stance in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The united front seemed to fortify their relationship, as Ethan, ever outspoken, routinely came to his wife’s defense.
Their show lost thousands of subscribers, but loyal fans stuck with them — fans who now say they are gutted and confused by the news of the affair. Many in disbelief noted that Ethan had Hila’s face tattooed on his arm less than two years ago as a surprise for her.
“The greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother,” says the quote surrounding the tattoo.
The Forward attempted to contact the Kleins through their work emails and did not immediately hear back.
The post They met on a Birthright trip then married. Now this American Israeli couple’s internet fame has turned to infamy. appeared first on The Forward.
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These Jewish college students have some ‘nonnegotiables’ for El-Sayed
At the University of Michigan, first-year student Robert Kashan, 18, and sophomore Jacob Reich, 19, sat behind a large blue sign. “Some things are nonnegotiable,” it declared in all caps.
The sign laid out their requirements for any candidate seeking their support: a commitment to Jewish safety, “including for Zionist Jews,” and supporting Jewish statehood in Israel, among other positions.
“Zionism is a legitimate part of the Democratic coalition, and a lot of us are feeling less represented by the Democratic Party,” Kashan told the Forward.
The students are part of a broader “Nonnegotiable” movement in Michigan, a coalition of Jewish Democrats who are spelling out their dealbreakers for candidates ahead of the Senate election between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
The movement has attracted national attention, with hundreds of rabbis across 34 states signing on to the “Nonnegotiable” demands. Meanwhile, about 20 students at the University of Michigan have publicly signed, while hundreds more offered support anonymously, according to Reich.
The “Nonnegotiable” supporters aren’t saying whom they’ll vote for if their concerns aren’t addressed — or whether they’ll vote at all. But they are pushing back against the assumption that Jewish voters will, as the saying goes, “vote blue no matter who,” urging El-Sayed to engage with their demands if he hopes to earn their support.
That’s in contrast with two other Jewish political camps, including a group called Michigan Jews for Democracy that endorsed El-Sayed. Their petition, which has garnered almost 1,000 signatures, notes that some signatories hold reservations about El-Sayed but are voting for him nonetheless as a check on President Trump.
“We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move,” the petition reads.
A competing petition, dubbed “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” has drawn hundreds of signatures from Michigan Jews who plan to vote for Rogers. That petition similarly emphasizes that Rogers voters may still have reservations about the candidate: “Our vote for Mike Rogers does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump,” it reads.
“Nonnegotiable,” meanwhile, rejects the idea that Jewish voters would have to choose between Zionist and Democratic values. Some have criticized the nonnegotiable movement for ignoring the reality of the electoral choice at hand. Others have called it “a veiled attempt to excuse the actions of Jewish Democrats who want to feel validated about voting for Mike Rogers.”
But Kashan and Reich, who met at Hillel and plan to major in political science, said the “Nonnegotiable” movement was the only way they could see themselves engaging in the election, as they felt increasingly pulled between their identities as Democrats and as Jews.
Some Michigan Jews have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. Rogers, who Trump has endorsed, earlier this week called El-Sayed “anti-Jew.”
In a letter to Michigan Jews, El-Sayed has vowed to “stand up against antisemitism and take the threat of violence against our Jewish community incredibly seriously.” He has also hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks leading up to the election.
This will be the first election when Kashan, who just turned 18, is eligible to vote, and Reich’s first national election after voting in a local primary in his hometown of Palo Alto, California. For both, voting Democratic in their first major election had once seemed like a given.
“I’m a Jewish Democrat, and I want Democrats to take the Senate,” Reich said. “I want to vote for a Democrat in my own state.”
They’re still holding out hope that will happen — and that, with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election, El-Sayed will sign on to their petition.
And if he doesn’t? Neither student is ready to say.
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Does anyone in Jerusalem care what happens to us?
An Israeli think tank has put on paper what most American Jews know in their kishkas: Israel’s actions over there affect our safety here.
So here’s my question: Does anybody over there care?
The report, published by The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), drew on the input of 20 Jewish leaders from five countries. It concluded that Israel’s actions since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 have normalized hostility toward Israel, divided Jewish communities, sapped the political influence of pro-Israel organizations and fueled antisemitism.
Those actions include damaging statements by government officials, limits on humanitarian aid to Gaza at the height of the war, widespread damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank. The authors also cited as inflammatory “the proliferation of images of civilian death and suffering in Gaza” — though the actual civilian death and suffering has also alienated and enraged many outside Israel, including Jews.
“The conflict is not only over there in the Middle East, it is local all over the Jewish world now, and Diaspora Jewry has skin in the game,” said Theodore Sasson, one of the report’s authors, in an interview with JTA’s Andrew Silow-Carroll, who first wrote about the study.
To be clear, the report doesn’t excuse, exonerate or rationalize people who commit antisemitic acts. “Jews and Israelis are not to blame for antisemitism,” the report states.
“What we’re saying is that Israel is not the cause” of antisemitism, Sasson said, “but enlightened Israeli policy can seek to maintain robust Diaspora support for the state of Israel and can deny the antisemites the material that fuels their mostly spurious claims.”
This is not a novel connection. Three previous academic studies, in Belgium, Australia and the U.S. found statistically significant links between Israeli military operations that result in high Palestinian casualties and spikes in reported antisemitic incidents abroad. Not surprisingly, a Mellman group poll found that 56% of U.S. Jewish voters believe Israel’s policies have fueled antisemitism.
None of this means Israel shouldn’t act in its own interest and put the security needs of its own population first. Antisemites would continue to exist even if Israelis did nothing but play backgammon and sip arak. The report is not about eradicating antisemitism, but about Israeli actions that provoke and endanger Jews abroad — and what Israel can do about those.
I get the principled resistance to a report that seems to shift some of the burden of antisemitism onto the Jews. David Bernstein of the North American Values Institute told Silow-Carroll that American Jews aren’t agents of Israel, and that nobody would say an African country’s actions endanger African Americans. That’s not entirely true — the 9/11 attacks increased hate crimes against American Muslims and bigots targeted random Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pretending actions have no consequence even if the reaction is illegitimate is principled, but naive. If Israel can lower the temperature, it should.
But here’s the sad fact about the current Israeli government: it doesn’t even lower the temperature for its own citizens.
Exhibit A is Oct. 7. This is the government on whose watch that horror happened, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never engaged in a full, independent accounting of what went wrong. How do you prevent future Oct. 7s when you don’t know the weaknesses that enabled it in the first place?
Exhibit B is the flydubai near-disaster, which we in the Diaspora have already mythologized as yet another example of Israeli courage and pluck. It was that, but also a result of a complete breakdown of government responsibility. Israel’s rules should have kept the Omani pilot out of that cockpit, but, as Channel 12 reported, Minister of Transportation Minister Miri Regev took no action despite multiple warnings. Regev, a close ally of Netanyahu, remains in her job.
Finally, Exhibit C: Police under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have failed to curb violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities which recorded 252 murders in 2025 — and 2026 is on track to surpass that record.
Israel’s supporters often comfort themselves with the mantra that Israelis love life while their enemies love death. But this government has been pretty cavalier about life.
If that’s how Israel’s leaders treat their own citizens, is it so surprising they fail to be overly concerned about Jews abroad? Last year saw the highest death toll from antisemitic attacks in 30 years, while the agency Israel created specifically to deal with such calamities has been AWOL. The Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, a Tel Aviv University report found, has “not contributed in any meaningful way to the cause, and in some cases has been an embarrassment.”
All this is happening as the screws are tightening on Jewish communities in Australia, France, Italy, Canada and elsewhere. But Israel, established in part to keep Jews safe, has, under this government, too often increased or ignored the dangers. Zionism is supposed to be the Diaspora’s Iron Dome, but this government, by inexorably, deliberately foreclosing on the possibility of a democratic Jewish state, is functionally anti-Zionist.
The report listed several measures Israel could take to reduce the threat to Diaspora communities, among them controlling the incendiary rhetoric of government ministers and opening a diplomatic path with the Palestinians that stops the slide toward a single, non-democratic state.
One of the report’s recommendations is that Israel set up procedures to assess how its policies affect Jews abroad. In other words, the think tank is asking the government to start caring, formally.
It’s hard to imagine any of that happening unless, on Oct. 27, Israelis vote the current government out.
“Netanyahu cannot be part of the healing process. It is Netanyahu from whom we must be healed,” David Horovitz, the far-from-radical founding editor of The Times of Israel, wrote this week in an editorial titled, “For Israel’s Sake, Netanyahu Has to Go.”
As it turns out, it’s for all our sakes.
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